Cracked LCD- Warhammer Quest IOS in Review

I’m not the one to ask if Rodeo Games’ Warhammer Quest adequately simulates or replicates the out-of-print and outrageously expensive board game upon which the app is based. Confessional, I never got a chance to play it. By the time I had caught up with wanting to play the widely beloved and venerated dungeoncrawl- regarded by many to be the best of the genre- it was already priced out of my willing-to-spend range and most of my owning friends had moved on to other games. But I also wouldn’t be able to tell you because Rodeo Games willfully back-ended all of the board gamey stuff and turned out a video game based on a board game, most definitely not a “port”. Thankfully, that means there are no silly animations of clattering dice or digital card decks flippity-flapping around. But that also means that the game is often maddeningly opaque and mechanically obscure.

The good news, however, is that Warhammer Quest is an awesome board game-influenced video game. It’s also a perfect fit for the iPad or iPhone because it isn’t nearly as hardcore as you may be inclined to think it is. A dungeon-delve is a ten minute affair, tops. It’s easy to jump in, slaughter some Snotlings, and then go back to your day job. It’s also tremendously addictive. Looking at my save game file, I’ve put in 12 hours toward the game in a week, and that’s about 12 times what you might spend with lesser apps. Heck, it’s twice as long as I spent with Bioshock: Infinite.

It’s compellingly uncluttered, straightforward, and it never bogs down like even the best turn-based strategy games often do. Although some of the finer mechanical details are shuffled away behind a curtain of accessibility and immediacy, it remains a simple game about moving warriors in a dungeon and attacking bad guys. As a reward, you might get a new piece of equipment or money to spend in one of the towns dotting an overworld map. The dungeons themselves are simplistic and even repetitive, although there are also narrative events that occasionally happen in both the dungeons and towns that add some much-needed world-building and story.

It starts off fairly easy, even on the harder difficulty settings, and you may think your warriors are overpowered. But give it time, and suddenly you’ll realize that the game was just saving up for you to hit level three or four. This is primo hack-and-slash, with your team often facing random appearances of ten or eleven enemies at once. It’s totally badass, in classic Warhammer style, to watch your Archmage just melt a room full of guys with Arcane Unforgiving or to see your Trollslayer Deathblow every enemy he’s adjacent to. But get cocky and rush into a room when your Mage has a low Winds of Magic draw or when your Warrior Priest’s prayers are weak, and you might find your guys downed or dead. There is a permadeath option if you want to ramp up the sense of risk.

What strikes me the most about Warhammer Quest, which is itself a very influential game in the lineage that extends from Magic Realm to Heroquest to Descent, is how well it acquits itself as both a video game and as an example of the best qualities of a tabletop dungeoncrawl. It never denigrates into the kind of tactical number-crunching that a game of Descent always seems to, and it’s much less niche (or abusive) as a typical Roguelike. It’s like this kind of twilight zone game, existing between tabletop and video game, but definitely skewing toward the latter.

That said, it’s a shame that Rodeo seems so hell-bent on hiding the more board gamey parts. There should have been an option to see the die rolls, target numbers, and effects. I still have no idea what actually triggers a random event or what determines when a Deathblow occurs. I have no idea if the enemies operate on an AI or if they are on a triage system that would likely be in the GM-less board game version. There should be an option to bring all of these elements to the forward for those who want to know why things are happening.

But in a video game, you usually don’t care about things like that and so I don’t find myself complaining too much about it, in the long run. 12 hours invested into the game indicates that it doesn’t bother me that much. So here again, it totally works as a video game- not just as a port of a popular game. That’s pretty important, I think, to the success of the app.

By now, 781 words into the review, I’m sure you’re asking yourself “when is Barnes going to mention the IAPs”. Here it is. The base game is $4.99. You can buy two additional characters at $2.99 a piece and an additional campaign area that also adds Skaven for $4.99. This parceling out of content is a huge mistake because each constituent piece is, by App Store standards and not in comparison to AAA video games, overpriced. None of the IAP is really essential, but anyone that plays and enjoys this game- which I think is going to be just about anyone with the wherewithal to download it- is going to want the additional content. And the game definitely has hooks to get you interested- that awesome armor you just found? Oh yeah, only the Archmage can use it.

Rodeo should have had the confidence to either reduce the base game to 99 cents, reduce the IAPs to 99 cents, or to sell the IAPs as a bundle for a discount. As it stands, I recommend you view your purchase of Warhammer Quest as a $20 one, not a $5. I’m not saying that you won’t have hours of fun at the $5 price, but you will be missing some neat things that are worthwhile, including the ability to field a more dynamic and varied team and additional enemies.

Finally, to address a common complaint, rotating the screen to see the inventory menu is great. It’s unobtrusive and it leverages a feature of the iDevice not commonly used for this kind of purpose. But there again, Rodeo should have given players an option to do so with an on-screen button. There are a lot of minor oversights like that throughout the app. For example, I can’t stand that there is no comparison of new versus old equipment and there are a couple of areas where the UI could be improved- but there’s nothing that’s an unfixable deal-breaker, and nothing that ultimately sullies an otherwise terrific game.

Games writer Michael Barnes is a co-founder of Nohighscores.com as well as FortressAT.com. His trolling has been published on the Web and in print in at least two languages and in three countries. His special ability is to cheese off nerds using the power of the Internet and his deep, dark secret is that he's actually terrible at games. Before you ask, no, the avatar is not him. It's Mark E. Smith of The Fall.

Well, I don’t think Chick was completely off base in some of his comments, but I do think that you’ve got to go into this aware that it is NOT a 1:1 replica of the board game. Rodeo (with GW’s blessing) intended for this game to be a VIDEO GAME based on the tabletop version, not a nuts-and-bolts clone of it.

I still think they could have had a better in-game description of the mechanics and visible RNG results (along with WHY you’re getting an random number) but as a video game, it does just fine.

It sounds like this game strikes this really awkward middle zone where it is both too. and hot quite board gamey enough. It doesn’t have the immediacy or variety in gameplay to form a satisfying Diablo or Rougelike style game. It also obfuscates the opaque rules, such that the causal link between your actions and the results feel arbitrary and unclear.

Correct me if that’s inaccurate, but it just seems to me that this game could have benefited from dedicating more in either direction.

I am still pretty fond of the old Warhammer Quest. It does work best as a very lightweight dugeon crawl RPG system.

The game is strikingly close to the feel of WQ, and they obviously went to some effort to emulate almost every individual system in the game, but using different numbers and systems to drive the thing. I suspect they took the Hunters game system, and just mapped the original WQ math onto Hunters—-

Deathblows are when you kill an enemy in a single shot. (There are arguments as to whether the enemy must be unwounded before the hit.) And events are generated whenever the 1D6 roll to determine the Wizard’s power for the turn ends up as a 1. Most of the events in the boardgame are spawns, which gets pretty old.

The original rules are REALLY simple. Fairly close to the D&D Boardgame from the UK. The larger rulebook is mostly filled with extra monsters, town and wilderness encounter tables, and a 3 level dungeon for GM-guided play.

I agree with Tom Chick’s complains: the game is really the board game with a neater reskin, and a few changes : it still uses one D6 to compute your hit roll, or your magic allocation, it uses the same tables for to hit, and similar formulas for damage.
Some skills have been changed a little, but most of the rules remain unchanged, which makes hiding the dice log a bad design decision IMO (and not documenting the probabilities anywhere ever).
That said, the game is pretty terrific indeed, and I don’t find the lack of information that disturbing (but they should at least have provided the Rulebook!).
Concerning the DLC characters, I find most of them inferior to the stock ones (the slayer is a good replacement for the archer IMO, the warrior priest buffs can be quite handy, but they are unreliable, and he lacks the punch of the pure melee fighters, and the archmage is even less reliable than the Grey Wizard). Their main use is spreading the XP (because you cannot rotate anyone out of your party with only 4 slots), and making losing someone less critical in hardcore (which was the base “difficulty” of the board game).

The skaven expansion is very good though : it offers some needed variety, and the levels are more challenging than the orc ones (except for the final orc dungeon which remains the hardest IMO).